You’re backing yourself into a corner where you’ll have to respond to every shitbird that comes crying some content hurt their feelings. Removing illegal material is the only thing that’s expected, moderating people’s opinions because they might make someone put glue on pizza is solved by a “nothing on this instance should be considered a fact” banner. It seems petty and the optics only get worse as you slowly burn out and stop being consistent in censoring shit. Because that’s what it is. A cat might not be too stoked with its carefully balanced plant-based slop, but it’d be alive. Hope you’ll go into kink communities and censor the shit out of risky sexual practices.

Don’t feel there are many people who actually use the phrase “free speech absolutist” these days, as a forward self-identification, who have much personal integrity or actual understanding of what that phrase might mean.

This is a bit learning the wrong lesson from what happened, isn’t it? The problem is admin overreach. There was some disagreement on a sub, no big deal. I don’t even care what it’s about, I have no opinion on it. But now this admin comes in like Eric Cartman “Respect mah authoritah!”. What am I supposed to make of that? Nobody was advocating animal abuse. I worry about admins who can’t just let something go, who can’t handle disagreement, like a cop always looking to escalate.

So thanks for the rules clarification, I guess, but what about:

• won’t this general guideline of ‘do no harm’ stifle discussion in case it isn’t clear which is the harmful position? For example covid
• is there a process in place when an admin does something in the heat of the moment, that the admin team can let them cool off for a bit?
• is removing mods going to be the norm?
• will there be more rules when another admin disagrees with a mod?
• why was this escalated like this? Don’t you think removing mod status is an overreaction (procedure wise)?
• does the ‘anti animal abuse’ statute apply to animal consumption and animal products? Vegan community has a point there
• what about rooki?

All in all, please don’t kill this instance by telling people what to think. There is healthy discussion and people don’t always have to agree. That doesn’t make me a ‘free speech absolutist’. I think removing admin privileges was quite out of bounds. Again, nobody was advocating animal abuse at all.

Mods and admins are here to keep discussion healthy, not impose their views on everyone else, right? So don’t! And don’t cover for others who do!

This doesn’t sound like free speech is welcomed here.

Am I wrong?

This instance gave me many signs of this happening, where only what one group of people think MUST be followed, but this kind of cements that now.

This rogue admin was absolutely not acting with the best intentions. Is he kicked out of the admin team?

He was abusing the term “misinformation” even though it was extremely obvious that he had a personal vendetta against vegans. A vegan pet diet is perfectly possible, and vegans were merely saying that. There was no question for a source by anybody, because the source is just a simply google search away.

This admin is just anti vegan and was on a personal vendetta. He saw an opportunity to classify it as misinformation, so he just started removing posts and banning people. Why was /c/Vegan specifically targeted by this person?

“Oh but this vegan diet for your pet might hurt it!!”, bro you’re literally the one paying others to slaughter living beings.

I love the strong emotional takes on what is animal abuse from all the meat eaters in here.

My goodness.

It’s not the same thing, but IMO the best things the admins can do is establish a runbook of sorts of how to deal with these situations - because they’re not out of the realms of possibility.

Where I disagree with some is in the rules needing to be black and white. There are instances, say for example a self-harming support group or a community that deals with conditions with no medical cure. IMO this is where nuance is key, because people will share misinformation or procedures that could cause harm/illness. This is where a case by case basis is needed, and ultimately the “path of least harm” is where this will excel. Regardless, admins and mods should contribute to these runbooks for their case, so that there is an established plan that is transparent to all.

Not my instance, but after perusing those links, what’s the point? “Generally” this, “generally” that, paired with vague obligations. Doesn’t matter a bit if you have an actual problem with a member of the administration time and the rest buddy up and play silent.

Let me ask you this, you’ve been up for quite a while, you’ve had staff rollovers, you must have had issues with at least one of your admins. Have you been transparent about them and reached out to anyone who might have been affected by them and publicly apologized and addressed any actions on their behalf, or have you played coy and just ignored them and kept quiet about them, releasing at best only excuses that have kept any internal drama hidden lest they affect the donation/income streams?

Not really launching any accusations, but actions speak louder than words. Look at Reddit, it has a decent community guideline, and it means shit except whitewashing when it comes to actual enforcement.

People will go to any lengths to justify their bad behaviour to themselves.

All you need to do is not interfere in communities where you have no idea what you’re talking about, stop assuming you know better than everyone else just because you have some power over a meaningless message board. This isn’t an anti-vax community we’re talking about here and you’ve totally blown this way out of proportion to prevent admitting that the moderator was out of line.

You, the mod/admin exist to stop spam and hate speech and to empower users with tools and features that they want and find useful. Otherwise, just stay the fuck out of the way. Do not impose your will on your little petty fiefdoms, that is unwanted and unhelpful.

Lol

Internet has brought so many new social issues and yet no philosophers to ponder and find good solutions even though no one is working.

Strange

The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.

It’s a good policy imho, and I’m happy to see it

Science should prevail

I just want to say thank you, and I appreciate the team’s efforts to be excellent to each other.

I didn’t consider admins any more qualified in parsing medical journals than mods are. I’ve got letters behind my name and am not supremely confident in that. That said, anything like a pro-ana community should be quickly purged.

I’ve got no idea about the context of the vegan drama though.

Any chance the relevant incident could be unpacked and used as a demonstration of how these changes would alter the outcome or encourage a different outcome?

As someone who only saw pieces of it after the fact, I am potentially in the dark here about the purposes and context of these changes.

That being said, from what I did see, it seemed very much like an instance admin imposing themselves and their superior power on a community when there were probably plenty of other more subtle action that could have been taken, where subtlety becomes vital for any issue complex and nuanced enough to be handled remotely well. I’m not sure I’m seeing any awareness of this in this post and the links provided.

For instance, AFAICT, the “incident” involved a discussion of if or how a domestic cat could eat a vegan diet. Obviously that’s not trivial as they, like humans, have some necessary nutrients, and AFAICT the vegans involved were talking about how it could be done, while the admin involved was basically having none of that and removed content on the basis that it would lead to a cat dying.

And then in the misinformation link we have:

We also reserve the right to remove any sufficiently scientifically proven MALICIOUS information posted which a user may follow, which would result in either IMMINENT PHYSICAL harm to an INDIVIDUALS PROPERTY, the PROPERTY of OTHERS or OTHER LIVING BEINGS.

In the context of cats and their food … which “living beings” are being harmed and who is encouraging or discouraging this harm?

Whether you’re vegan or not, this seems to me formally ambiguous and on the face of it only enshrines the source of the conflict rather than facilitating better forms of communication or resolution (perhaps there are things in the by-laws I’ve missed??).

Two groups can have exactly the same aim and core values (reduce harm to living beings) but in the complexity of the issue come to issue a bunch of friendly fire … that’s how complex issues work.

So, back to my original question … how exactly would things be done better?